Artistry

Abstract Blue may project an artless persona, but its songs are artful in their design. This chapter shifts the emphasis from content to technique, exploring the aesthetic mastery on display in selected parameters of Mitchell’s craft. Her poetry features heterogeneous utterance, elastic meter, and complex imagery. She creates intriguing variations on standard formal types. Her melodic designs are attentive to the expressive traversal of space, the placement of hooks, and dynamic relations of complementarity, tension and release. Her unorthodox treatment of harmony involves unusual sonorities, modal mixture, polytonality, and pedal points. She draws on an expanded range of vocal nuance for fine characterization and intensity.